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big ugly bill
David Valadao Was the Deciding Vote for Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. Randy Villegas has a Plan to Defeat Him
Villegas, a working-class champion, is running to defeat Valadao this November.
Jul 07, 2026
Just over a year ago, Republicans passed the Big Ugly Bill into law. The bill slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid, SNAP, and the Affordable Care Act—even as it gives massive tax handouts to the wealthiest people in America. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are richer, while working families suffer and die without the health care they need.
Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) represents California’s 22nd district, where two-thirds of his constituents rely on Medicaid. That’s over half a million people! And it’s the highest number of Medicaid enrollees of any Republican-held congressional district in the country.
Before the vote, Valadao pledged that “I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid.” Then, he turned around and voted for this cruel monstrosity of a bill.
The Big Ugly Bill passed the US House by one vote. That means Valadao’s vote was decisive. He could have stopped families in his district from losing their health care. He could have stopped hospitals from cutting services and even closing their doors. He could have stopped Affordable Care Act premiums from skyrocketing. Instead, David Valadao betrayed the people he represents and showed where his true loyalties lie—with billionaires and Donald Trump.
The good news is that Randy Villegas, a working-class champion, is running to defeat Valadao this November. Villegas just won the Democratic nomination. I was proud to stand alongside him last week as we rallied outside Valadao’s office to mark the one-year anniversary of the Big Ugly Bill.
Villegas electrified the crowd, reminding us that: “Rep. Valadao voted to cut Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires. Meanwhile, Valadao has a government-sponsored health care plan that we pay for as taxpayers. He needs to use that plan to schedule a physical — to look for the spine that he's been missing.”
Rep. Valadao voted to cut Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires.
Meanwhile, Valadao has a government-sponsored health care plan that we pay for as taxpayers. He needs to use that plan to schedule a physical — to look for the spine that he's been missing. - @villegas_CA22 pic.twitter.com/RE5iEWOhIC
— Social Security Works ❌👑 (@SSWorks) July 1, 2026
Yet as hard as Villegas is fighting to repeal the Big Ugly Bill and save Medicaid, he also understands that just opposing Republican cuts isn’t enough. He declares that "I will be a proud co-sponsor of Medicare for All on day one because health care is a human right."
When I asked Villegas what he would do differently than past Democrats who have tried unsuccessfully to defeat Valadao, he gave a truly phenomenal answer:
"We can't just offer people not Trump or not David Valadao.
We've got to offer people a vision for something more.
Not only are we going to stop the attempts to privatize Social Security, but we're going to expand Social Security." - @villegas_CA22 pic.twitter.com/xhnV2bzirV
— Social Security Works ❌👑 (@SSWorks) July 1, 2026
“We can't just offer people not Trump or not David Valadao. We've got to offer people a vision for something more. Not only are we going to stop the attempts to privatize Social Security, but we're going to expand Social Security.”
That says it all.
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Democratic Voters Want Fighters, Not Cowardly Cavers
The establishment wing of the party has once again sold out the people they were elected to represent.
Nov 12, 2025
If there is one key lesson from last week's blowout victory for Democrats, it's that Democratic voters want fighters. In waiting less than a week after the elections to announce their unilateral surrender late on a Sunday night, the eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus who handed Trump and his Republican allies total victory in exchange for nothing sold those voters out.
While Democratic voters in the November 4th election were elated by the first triumph in quite a while, the cavers took the wind out of their sails. There's a serious danger that some of these constituents won't bother to vote in the 2026 elections. It could cost the Democrats the election and allow MAGA to keep control of the House and Senate, while impoverishing many poor and working-class Americans. With gerrymandering, there will likely be only about 40 competitive House districts (and six or seven competitive Senate races). Many of them will be likely decided by a few thousand (or even a few hundred) votes and there's a good chance that the disillusionment with Democratic cowardice could make the difference in deciding who controls both chambers of Congress.
The two biggest stars emerging from the November 4th elections are Zorhan Mamdani and Gavin Newsom. They're from different wings of the Democratic Party—Mamdani is an unyielding progressive while Newsom is generally a moderate. What they had most in common was their willingness in this election to be fighters.
While many Democrats were wringing their hands over Texas's midterm gerrymandering, which is likely to hand Republicans five House seats, Newsom came up with the idea to amend the California Constitution to pick up five House seats for Democrats. He managed to get it on the ballot, despite the opposition of some Democrats who argued that "two wrongs don't make a right." After being the leading voice in support of Proposition 10, Newsom's amendment won in a 20-point landslide.
The result is that the handsome and articulate governor is now the likely front-runner for the 2028 Democratic Presidential nomination.
On the other side of the country, Mamdani received over 50% of the votes in a 3-way race. He mobilized over 100,000 volunteers, brought out the greatest number of voters in a New York mayoral race in years, and held huge rallies of enthusiastic supporters. He won 70% of voters under age 45 and 75% of those under 30. Many of this age group are not regular voters but jammed the polls to vote for Mamdani. They're the future of the Democratic Party, if they continue to vote in such numbers.
With his fighting outsider campaign, Mamdani became one of the leading young faces in the Democratic Party.
The victory parties for Newsom's Proposition 10 and Mamdani's mayoral win were raucous, joyous, and filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.
But the eight moderate Senate cavers couldn't wait even a week to take the wind out of their sails. Many of them, including those who were first-time voters, may be so discouraged and disillusioned that they hey won't bother showing up at the polls next November.
It may be that Republicans would have never agreed to pass the extension to the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Sooner or later, Democrats who, unlike Republicans actually care about the well-being of SNAP recipients, may have had to let the Big Ugly Bill pass. But, honestly, what was the fucking rush? Why couldn't they wait for more than a week after the elections to cave? They could have at least taken the time to explain their actions to voters and then maybe given in around Thanksgiving so as not to spoil the holiday. But if they were so desperate to unilaterally surrender after letting the country suffer for over a month in return for a non-deal they could have gotten at the beginning, why was it worth bothering with a shutdown in the first place?
If the quick surrender of so-called "moderates" depresses many who voted Democratic on November 4th so much that they won't be motivated to return to the polls next November, the Democratic cowards caucus may have made it harder for the party to win in 2026.
In any case, it's clear that people who voted for Democrats and policies on November 4th wanted fighters, not cowards. The lesson is also clear: without fighters, we're lost.
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As the US Detains and Deports, Venezuela Reunites Families
A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Aug 05, 2025
In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed a budget that commits at least $131 billion to expanding detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is the largest immigration enforcement package in modern U.S. history and one that most people are funding without knowing.
Public pension funds, university endowments, and municipal budgets are deeply invested in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) machinery. If you pay into a retirement fund, attend a university, or live in a major city, your money might be helping detain someone. Your tax dollars already are.
The plan triples ICE’s funding, revives the failed border wall project, builds new jails for families, and allocates $10 billion in unregulated funds to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At the same time, up to 17 million people risk losing healthcare and millions of children face losing access to school meals.
These priorities are not accidental. They reflect a political strategy that treats migration as a threat to be neutralized rather than a consequence of U.S. policy. This budget doesn’t just expand infrastructure, it expands a racialized system of surveillance, incarceration, and profit, while shrinking legal protection, due process, and public oversight.
Here’s what the new immigration budget includes:
- $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation—a threefold increase;
- $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers, including for children and families;
- $46.6 billion for border wall construction, which is more than triple what U.S. President Donald Trump spent in his first term;
- $10 billion in unregulated DHS funding to “safeguard the border” without oversight;
- A daily detention capacity of 116,000 human beings, enough to fill a stadium with mothers, students, toddlers, and elders or to disappear the entire population of Lansing, Michigan or Athens, Georgia; and
- An 800 person limit on the number of immigration judges, worsening already record-breaking court backlogs and delaying due process for millions.
ICE Is Everywhere
ICE doesn’t operate alone. It dances with Palantir’s algorithms. It swallows data from school and Department of Motor Vehicles records. It whispers to local cops in sanctuary cities. It hides in contracts signed by universities that claim to care about inclusion. It is public and private, visible and invisible, and always expanding.
The border doesn’t stop at the border.
ICE shares tech, tactics, and training with local police across the U.S., especially in Black and Brown communities. The same algorithms used to deport migrants are used to lock up teenagers in Chicago, LA, and New York. The war economy is domestic, too.
Migration Is Not a Crisis; U.S. Policy Is
The people being detained and deported are not a crisis. They are the result of one. U.S. foreign policy, through sanctions, coups, climate extraction, and economic warfare, has destabilized entire regions and then criminalized those who flee.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Venezuela.
Years of U.S. sanctions have severely constrained Venezuela’s economy and pushed millions to migrate. A recent study in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral economic sanctions lead to an estimated 564,000 deaths every year, mostly among children under five. The researchers concluded that sanctions are a form of economic warfare with deadly consequences, often as destructive as armed conflict. Venezuela is among the countries most severely affected.
A Stark Contrast: Venezuela’s Efforts to Reunite Families
Despite being locked out of international markets, denied access to its own reserves, and targeted by ongoing U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan government has prioritized reuniting families separated by deportation. Flights have been organized to return Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. and neighboring countries. Deportees are met with medical care, housing support, and assistance. There are no billion-dollar detention centers. No ankle monitors. No private contractors. Just the political decision to bring people home with dignity.
This reflects a deeper difference. The United States continues to expand a war economy, one that profits from incarceration, surveillance, and militarized borders. Corporations like Palantir, CoreCivic, and GEO Group are major beneficiaries of immigration funding, alongside weapons manufacturers and data firms. In contrast, Venezuela’s response, under siege, has been to build on a peace economy rooted in social programs, community organization, and everyday resilience.
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee.
Much of that work is led by women.
In Venezuela, Madres Víctimas del Fascismo have been organizing alongside the government to locate, support, and repatriate their children, many of whom were detained in the U.S. or in Latin American countries. These mothers have worked with consular authorities, spoken in public forums, and demanded state action to bring their families back together. Through their pressure, and the government’s cooperation, some have already seen their children return home.
This is what a peace economy looks like, one built on social programs, community organization, and state-supported reunification.
The Violence of the Border Enforcement Is the Violence of the Empire
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee. Venezuela knows this intimately. Its economy has been blocked, its institutions targeted, and its people criminalized the moment they cross a border. And yet it was Venezuela that welcomed deported migrants with food, medicine, and housing; they were greeted with care. A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Who Is Complicit?
This system doesn’t operate in just one region. It’s not limited to Texas or Arizona. It’s embedded across the country, in contracts, databases, and quiet forms of cooperation.
Schools often share data, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Universities collaborate with DHS through software licensing and research grants. Investors, including public pension funds and university endowments, hold shares in GEO Group, Palantir, and other deportation profiteers.
The U.S. has made its priorities clear. It is willing to spend more to detain migrants than to house the hundreds of thousands living unhoused on the streets of its cities. It is expanding detention while limiting legal avenues for relief. It is responding to the consequences of its foreign policy with policing not accountability.
It’s not enough to say “Abolish ICE.” We must hold accountable every institution that feeds its machinery, from schools that share data, to universities that license surveillance tech, to investors profiting from migrant detention.
Migration is not a crime. U.S. sanctions are.
- End institutional cooperation with ICE
- Demand divestment from companies profiting off detention
- Organize against U.S. sanctions and intervention
The war economy is everywhere. So the resistance must be, too.
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How to Speak up for Medicaid This August
This summer, you have a rare opportunity to help save American democracy by advocating against the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s mega-bill.
Aug 01, 2025
As members of Congress return to their districts for what is traditionally called the August congressional recess, Republican members will be working overtime to sell their constituents on the benefits of the Trump mega-bill (technically the “One Big Beautiful Bill”).
Republicans know well that this August will determine the outcome of the crucial 2026 midterm elections. In a memo from the Republican National Campaign Committee (NRCC) obtained by Politico, GOP members of Congress were advised that:
While the election is still more than a year away, this August in-district work period is an opportunity to go home and sell your work to your constituents. With the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law by President Trump just a few weeks ago, this is a critical opportunity to continue to define how this legislation will help every voter and push back on Democrat fearmongering.
The NRCC memo advises GOP members of Congress not to let Democrats define the agenda on Medicaid by stressing public support for eliminating waste and fraud and by instituting work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. Polling suggests that Republicans have their work cut out for them. Research conducted for The Wall Street Journal found that:
The findings show Republicans’ challenges in selling the law’s benefits as they try to hold their slim control of the House and Senate in next year’s midterm elections, and the poll demonstrates how Democrats might be able to capitalize on voters’ skepticism to stage a comeback. Overall, the law drew 42% support and 52% opposition, performing slightly worse than Trump himself in the poll. It generated negative marks from 94% of Democrats, 12% of Republicans, and 54% of independents.
On the other side of the call, The Wall Street Journal research shows there is support for work requirements and increased checks on Medicaid eligibility. Furthermore, as always, there is support for tax cuts. Much will depend on how the issues are framed. Right now, there is a lot of blank space for Democrats or Republicans to work with. Polling from CNN finds that only 27% say that they have been following debate over U.S. President Donald Trump’s mega-bill “very closely.”
In these times, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and that there is little or nothing that one person can do to make a difference. Nothing could be further from the truth. This August you have a rare opportunity to help save American democracy by speaking out against the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s mega-bill. Reach out to your member of Congress and find out how you can attend a town meeting and speak out in support of Medicaid. If your member of Congress is not holding a town meeting, stop by their district office and share your concerns with congressional staff. Trust me as a former congressional district office staffer, your presence will be noted.
If you have never gone to a congressional town meeting or met with a member of Congress, it can be intimidating. There is no need to be nervous. Remember that they work for you! Here are some simple tips that might be helpful:
- Remind your member of Congress that according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicaid pays for the care of fully 60% of patients in nursing homes.
- Tell your member of Congress that according to the American Hospital Association, 40% of all the births in this country are paid for by Medicaid.
- Convey the real-world impact of what cuts to Medicaid would be. Do not fall into the trap of defending Medicaid as a government program. Instead, talk about anyone you know who relies on Medicaid. If you rely on Medicaid, you should share that. Polling data shows that fully 60% of Americans know someone who depends on Medicaid. The more personal you make the issue of Medicaid, the more effective you will be.
- If you live in a rural area, tell your member of Congress that their vote for the Trump mega-bill will hurt your local hospital. According to the National Rural Health Association, “the bill will limit access to care for all rural patients by ending healthcare coverage for rural residents nationwide and putting financial strain on rural facilities who care for them.” Do not talk about rural hospitals in general, talk about your local hospital and why it is important.
- Provide the “why” in your Medicaid advocacy. Tell your member of Congress that you know that Medicaid is being cut to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
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We Need a New Punctuation Mark to Catch the Essence of Trumpian Decline
What we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
Aug 01, 2025
Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future.
I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that’s not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of—and this is the word he uses—“evil.” Once upon a time, this would have been inconceivable even in your wildest all-(un)-American dreams! Not a shot in hell of a chance! Never!
Until, of course, it happened (yes, twice).
And indeed, I have to repeat that “once upon a time” because the American past, however grim in all too many periods of our history, now seems something like a dark fairy tale to me. A distinctly “once upon a time” creation.
It really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline.
Having just turned 81 myself, I wonder what world I’m now really living in and how, in that very same world, any of us could ever have ended up here. Sometimes I try to imagine telling my parents about—I have the urge to capitalize this word but can’t quite bring myself to do it, so italics will have to do—him. My mother was a professional caricaturist for an endless string of newspapers and magazines, and she drew, among other grim figures in this country and on this planet, Sen. Joe McCarthy, a distinctly Trumpian character from her moment. The difference being that he was just a senator, not the president of the United States. And he was able to do his damnedest (and that’s definitely the word for it) for only a few grim years before the Senate censured him and he essentially drank himself to death. And yet, having lived through presidents from Theodore Roosevelt when she was born in 1907 to Jimmy Carter in the year of her death in 1977, I have no doubt that Donald Trump would have left her speechless (or do I mean pen or pencil-less?).
My father, at age 35, immediately joined the U.S. Air Force after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and served in Burma during World War II. Even though he was, like my mother, a Democrat, he would have found someone who got out of the U.S. military in wartime thanks to fake “bone spurs” almost unimaginable as president. And that would have only been the first of an endless list of Trumpian things that my mom and dad, not to speak of more or less anyone else of their generation, would have found unbelievable in an American president. Even Ronald Reagan (and that’s no small “even”) seemed like a reasonably sane president by comparison.
It’s hard for me to imagine how I would tell either of them about President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that’s cutting so much, including medical care, for so many Americans at the bottom of the political spectrum in order to give a $975 billion tax break to the wealthiest 1% of us. Or as he put it, “I said to one guy, he’s a very, very unattractive man, but he’s smart and he’s rich, and I said, ‘You better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’”
Red-Tie Decline
And yet, believe it or not, here we are as August begins in 2025, six months into Donald Trump’s manic second term in office and ever deeper in the Trumpian swamp.
And prepare yourself. There’s really no way to write about this American world of ours without exclamation points! In fact, in some fashion, the exclamation point isn’t faintly enough for this moment. Perhaps what we in these all-too-dis-United States of America now truly need is to invent some far wilder form of punctuation to catch the essence of this moment!!! (Three exclamation points are certainly apt, but they don’t really work, do they?) Maybe, in fact, what we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
And let me make one small instant correction to my first paragraph here: Honestly, it really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline. And not, mind you, just the decline of the United States—though that’s certainly significant enough—but of the planet itself.
Yes, in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the last vestiges of the Cold War ended with the U.S. becoming this planet’s “sole superpower,” there were certainly thinkers who already sensed that someday, somewhere along the line, like any great imperial power, this country was bound to enter a path of decline. After all, what great power in history hadn’t done so sooner or later and, in the process, had some idiot or idiots run the show for a while?
Still, let’s face it, there’s decline and then there’s DECLINE (followed, of course, by several red ties). And Donald DECLINE (red tie, red tie) Trump has offered us a path down that simply couldn’t be more uniquely his. I doubt that anyone in the history of imperial power has ever both personalized and personified decline in quite such a… well, deeply, madly personal and unbearably convincing fashion.
Planetary Decline in the Age of Trump
And give him credit, he’s able to do it so much more convincingly because of his advanced age. After all, his second time around, he is indeed—offer him record-setting credit here (red tie)—the oldest president ever to take office in two and a half centuries of all-American history. In other words, in the next three years and five months, we’ll clearly be able to watch not just this 21st century imperial power of an almost unimaginable sort—consider, for instance, those 750 or so U.S. military bases that still span this globe of ours—or our 79-year-old president both decline in an up close and personal fashion, but our planet do so as well. And that’s something new in human history.
Never in the past has the Earth itself been on such a precipitous path downward. And before Donald Trump is done (or do I mean, like the rest of us aging creatures, done in?), given his attitude toward climate change, he may manage to take not just this country but the planet down with him. No small feat (and, believe me, I don’t mean feet or even bone spurs here [red tie]) when you think about it. (As a matter of fact, thinking about Donald D. Trump is, in every sense, a declinist activity[red tie].)
It’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too.
I mean from those devastating floods in Texas on the Fourth of July weekend, the deadliest inland flooding in this country in almost half a century, to the record-setting, never-ending mega-drought across the American Southwest, to those flooded subway stations in my hometown of New York, climate change is increasingly being felt by Americans of every sort. (It’s mid-summer and I’m sweating as I write this amid a striking heatwave across the Eastern U.S.) Climate change was certainly visible in the staggering temperatures that hit Europe this June, leading to an unexpectedly high death toll, and the horrifying wildfires that have recently ravaged parts of Greece and Turkey; the extensive flooding and other natural disasters in China; and the devastation of every sort it’s been causing in Africa. And that’s just to start down a list that certainly would have to include the Arctic, which may now be heating up four times faster than the global average.
Mind you, none of that should truly be surprising, since this year the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has peaked above 430 parts per million. That’s the highest it’s estimated to have been in millions of years, according to data recently released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And overall, it’s estimated that, in the last year alone, climate change has added an extra 30 days of extreme heat for more than 4 billion people globally. Think about that for a moment, take a breath, and make sure you’re not overdressed.
And the Trump response to all of this? Among other things, to open Alaska’s wilderness areas more fully to oil and natural gas drilling and mining. Brilliant, no?
Trump Him (Red Tie)
All of that undoubtedly only makes Donald D. Trump all that much prouder. After all, he’s the man (or do I mean: The Man?). And imagine this: The country that was already the historically largest emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide is, under him, certain to retain that title for the (un)foreseeable future.
Of course, he invariably has an urge to be the ultimate record holder in anything. After all, he’s going all out to cut funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and NOAA that might have been used to deal in some fashion with climate change’s potential devastation in this country. As The New York Times recently reported, “In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.”
In his Big Beautiful Budget, he’s been ready to cut so much that matters to this country. Yet the soaring trillion-dollar military budget he’ll preside over (whatever its other problems, including its staggering cost for American taxpayers) will only add to the planetary mayhem by making the U.S. military “the 38th largest emitter [of carbon] in the world if it were its own nation.” And don’t forget the Trumpian-induced science brain drain from this country that’s now underway.
And yet here’s the strange thing (or rather one of all too many strange things): among the Trumpian—and yes, on this planet at this moment in this country, he’s certainly a noun, a verb, an adjective, and undoubtedly an adverb, too—wildness and disastrous acts being covered in the media, it’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too. In a sense, in fact, one thing Donald Trump has proven particularly skilled at is removing attention of any sort from climate change.
Yes, who doesn’t know that, among other things, he once called it a “Chinese hoax”? And it seems to matter not at all to him that, at this very moment, this planet is heating up in a record-setting fashion. Of course, I’ve been writing about just that reality repeatedly because it repeatedly stops me short.
Still, to this day, I can’t understand how 49.8% of American voters found Donald Trump appealing enough to elect him president (again!) in 2024. And of course, we’re talking about the guy who is reportedly dreaming about not running for but just being president a third time around—to hell with the Constitution. His backers have already produced a “Trump 2028” red cap, and he’s told some of them that it would be “the greatest honor of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times” (only later claiming that he was joking).
Don’t you have the urge to call George Orwell back from the dead to write a Trumpian sequel to 1984? Perhaps 2026? And speaking of bringing back the dead, if only I could bring back my parents and let my mother do her ultimate devastating caricature of Donald D. Trump.
However it happens, he really does need to be trumped before he Trumps us all off this planet and global bankruptcy becomes us.
Trump him (red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie).
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Trump's Big New Law Is a Disaster for the Big Blue Sea
A policy expert explains why the budget reconciliation bill will harm the ocean and attempts to protect and understand it.
Jul 31, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is not a fan of sharks or the ocean. From gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to seeking the expansion of offshore oil drilling and deep-sea mining while attacking wind energy, his view of our public seas is that they'll make a good gas station and garbage dump. And, this view is reflected in his major legacy bill recently passed into law by the MAGA majority in Congress.
But there's been little discussion about how this bill will impact our public seas. So, we (Vicki Nichols Goldman and myself) spoke with George Leonard, former chief scientist with the Ocean Conservancy and an ocean policy consultant about what's going on:
George Leonard (GL): I am a marine scientist by training. I got a master's in marine science and then a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and have for 25 years worked on the interface between science and policy. I think many of the moves made by the Trump administration are counter to good public policy and put the ocean at great risk.
David Helvarg (DH): George, during the first Trump administration, his focus seemed to be on opening it up for offshore drilling.
GL: Yeah, I think that's right. Now, on the one hand, it (the Trump administration's new ocean policy) feels disjointed, unorganized, and without a broader strategy. And yet if you then actually try to focus in on what's happening, it seems to be quite deliberate. The attacks on science and knowledge seem to be comprehensive and unrelenting. And that's really troubling, right? It's troubling for a whole generation of upcoming scientists, undergraduates, graduate students, you know, postdocs, people who are just getting started and having the legs cut out from underneath them. And then you combine that with a real disdain for anything related to renewable energy. Obviously, the ocean has a huge role to play in renewable energy.
Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VNG): I'm looking at the bill, and it's astounding that he is proposing a $2.2 billion reduction in NOAA's overall funding.
GL: By one account that I've seen there's 18 different line items, program areas that NOAA focuses on, and 11 of the 18 aren't just cut, they're terminated, like 100% reduction. The remaining (programs) experience a cut of between 20-60%. I mean, there's a lot of narrative around efficiency and (cutting) fraud and waste. But I have yet to see anything that supports these levels of cuts, certainly not in the NOAA space.
DH: And now they're doing major changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which has gotten America close to sustainable commercial fishing in federal waters. Fishermen can't be happy with that. Also, abolishing the Coastal Zone Management Act? That's every coastal state working in coordination with the feds to do good planning. What are some of the other really egregious things you saw coming out of this quote "Big Beautiful Bill"?
GL: I kept calling it the reconciliation bill because I refuse to call it the "big beautiful bill." Some I've heard call it the "big ugly bill." But look, the first thing that I think is really troubling is (getting rid of) the Ocean Observatories Initiative, right? That's a bunch of basic research and scientists working on a whole range of ocean-related science. Climate obviously is a big part of that, but also understanding the role of habitats and the importance of biodiversity and fisheries. That's entirely slated to be cut. I don't know how you pursue any kind of science-based work if you're going to reduce that to zero.
DH: That includes 10 laboratories working on climate and weather.
GL: That's right: 10 individual facilities that are to be closed. But the other big science-related piece for NOAA that many folks probably don't know they have is a big ocean observing system where there are literally high-tech buoys and devices deployed both in coastal waters and in offshore waters. They take the temperature, the pulse if you will, of the ocean and by my latest look, this is also slated for termination.
DH: And one of those ocean observing impacts is that it warns people when there are harmful algal blooms, when red tides are coming into Florida for example, when the beaches are going to be shut down. That warning system is gone. The public's being told, "Go swim at your own risk."
VNG: Or eat shellfish without knowing…
GL: Yes, harmful algal blooms can make water unfit to swim in. But they also have big impacts on the shellfish that we eat. And I know shellfish poisoning is nothing to laugh at. It can be extremely dangerous.
DH: I once interviewed a fisheries enforcement agent who demonstrated the effects of paralytic shellfish poisoning. He grabbed his throat and swelled up his tongue in his mouth and started gagging and flopping around on his desk very realistically. That guy's probably been laid off under this plan.
GL: Probably. You know there are other specific aspects of NOAA that are likewise being hobbled here. One is their ocean acidification program. You know burning fossil fuels is doing two things to the ocean. It's making the ocean hotter, and it's making the ocean more acidic. About 90% of the heat generated by climate change from burning fossil fuels ends up in the ocean and along with warming, it's also making the ocean more acidic. And that's simply because CO2 dissolves in water, and NOAA has spearheaded that work and done a lot of work with coastal shellfish farmers and others to address this issue, and that work (with the aquaculture industry) is being cut as well.
VNG: You think about acidification, what's so important is that you need those calcium carbonate ions, and with acidification, they're being reduced. And so, when you think about oysters and muscles and crabs and clams needing that material as basic building blocks, we're looking at enormous hits to the ocean's productivity.
DH: And people's livelihoods. The shellfish industry has become the indicator species for ocean acidification.
GL: And some of the biggest champions to address the broader issue of climate change and how it relates to ocean acidification have been shellfish farmers, particularly shellfish farmers on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.
DH: Now Trump's pushing deep-sea mining, and yet they've terminated NOAA's Ocean Exploration and Research division, which is all about exploring the deep ocean and understanding the places where they want to go and exploit it.
GL: There's all kinds of things like that that don't make sense. There was an executive order (from Trump) a while back about promoting U.S. aquaculture, and yet there's a cut to the (NOAA) aquaculture program in the reconciliation bill. So, what is that? Do we want to support aquaculture or do we want to undermine it? There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency there.
VNG: It just seems so challenging to follow the logic with this budget.
DH: It's almost vindictive, without logic, taking a chainsaw to places that may need scalpels or may in fact need to be expanded. Most people hearing about the bill are only hearing about it in terms of, "It'll add $3 or $4 trillion to the budget deficit" or "It will take Medicaid away from 12 million people and give tax benefits to the rich." But there's much more there. Like it will also impact our public seas in these many different ways that we're talking about. The Ocean used to be a bipartisan issue.
GL: Yeah, and there've been great examples of bipartisan work in the U.S. on oceans and fisheries and other issues. But when you look at the voting on this bill, it's pretty astounding. I mean, it's hard to ignore the fact that all the Democrats voted against it, and pretty much all the Republicans with a handful of exceptions, voted for it (passing it into law).
VNG: Well, I think we really need to engage with people who care about these issues. When people start linking up national, federal decisions with their own livelihoods, I think that's when people will start realizing, "Hmm, maybe there's an opportunity in the next election cycle to change what's happening."
GL: And of course, the great irony here is that NOAA had an Office of Education, which also is fully terminated. So whatever education and outreach and conversation is going to happen (around the ocean), it doesn't look like it's going to be led by NOAA, at least in the short term.
DH: No, and look at what we're seeing in other frontline agencies. I mean, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump, they're pushing to shift the market away from a clean energy transition and back to fossil fuels. They are promoting keeping coal-fired power plants open, which is a major source of mercury in tuna. Mercury out of the smoke stacks that precipitates onto the ocean and into the food web. It's crazy. We're literally at a point where market forces favor a transition to cleaner, cheaper energy, including offshore wind, and they're trying to use their political power to shift that balance back to offshore oil and the burning of coal while denying climate science.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse?
I mean democracies don't guarantee environmental improvement, but that never happens under dictatorships. You need to have democracy in order to have good environmental policy. And so, there's this larger issue: Are we moving away from democracy and is that why we're seeing these irrational power- and vengeance-driven attacks on our public seas?
GL: That's the $64,000 question, David. I don't have a great answer for that one. I'm really just a lowly marine scientist by training, but I do think those are important questions for us to ask and it certainly seems like the evidence, at least now, is pointing in that direction. You know, you were talking about renewable energy versus fossil fuels. Maybe we should acknowledge one very small win in the legislative process here. There was part of the bill that was going to put additional taxes on offshore wind and other renewable technologies that was stripped out of the final version of the bill. And what remains is the tax incentives that are the remainder of the Inflation reduction Act from the Biden administration that will not expire until 2027.
It's a minor win, but one I think that was hard fought for and all of these minor improvements that made the big bad bill less bad is because of advocates and public leaders in Congress and folks like yourselves who are bringing these issues to everybody's attention.
VNG: I want to go back to our national marine sanctuaries program, something that's vital for protecting critical habitats and species and yet they're cutting this program by 60%. And that also includes our national monuments (in the ocean). And you are living adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, so how do you feel these impacts are going to affect recovery?
GL: It's super disheartening. It's the underwater equivalent of our national park system, right? America's greatest idea, but underwater. You know, I grew up in Massachusetts and I remember seeing little sea urchins and teeny little plants and a couple of small fish, and I just thought this was the coolest thing. Then I came to California and flopped into a kelp forest out here, and it just blew my mind away. And I was spellbound, right? And, I realized pretty quickly that that kelp forest was just an example of what was in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which was a testament to just the incredible biodiversity and the amazing habitats that we have here.
So, it's really tough to think about what might be the future of that with a sanctuary office that's going to lose its superintendent and employees and people that I went to graduate school with who have made this their life, protecting the coastal ocean here. I've heard, you know, that they're only going to maintain the buoys in the sanctuaries through this bill and cease all on-water operations, which I'm still not sure what that means. I assume that means any kind of research, and they've also made a statement that they're no longer going to consider any new sanctuaries.
Now the National Marine Sanctuaries Act (the law) has a whole process by which new sanctuaries can be nominated and debated. And they're going to shut the door on any future sanctuaries? I think that's a real disservice to the legislation and to the public's ability to identify places that they want to see protected.
DH: So, George, in terms of looking at what the administration is doing with this new bill, what are the two or three ocean impacts that you think the marine conservation community should be focusing on and educating the public around?
GL: If we kind of step way back for a second, why is this a problem for the ocean? It's important to recognize what are the three big threats right now to ocean health.
In very simplistic terms, what's happening is that we're putting too much stuff into the ocean and we're taking too much stuff out of the ocean. So, we're putting in too much carbon, we're putting in too much plastic, we're putting in too many other pollutants, and we're basically taking out too many fish because there is still a global overfishing crisis.
And so, the United Nations has framed this up as sort of a triple planetary crisis where we have climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss as three separate but connected problems. And they need to be individually addressed, but they also need to be addressed in an integrative way because the ocean is one big connected system.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse? And I think it's not hard to make the argument that for all three of those problems, this bill makes them worse.
DH: And I'd just add that if you love the ocean, you have to love democracy too. And you have to fight like hell to turn the tide here.
GL: Absolutely. This is not a time to give up. I just saw a headline this morning that some of the Republicans have already started to push back a bit on some of the NOAA impacts largely because of advocacy from members of the public. So, you know, while the bill passed and was signed on July 4, we are still, I think, in the early days of what this is actually going to mean on the water. And we need to keep focused on that.
VNG: Looking for more opportunities for the public to get our voices out there and to make sure that we go out and vote and keep the ocean as a priority.
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Why We Can't Simply Celebrate Medicare's 60th Birthday
Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society.
Jul 30, 2025
Medicare turns 60 years old today. Former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on July 30, 1965, giving seniors a guarantee of health coverage that never existed before. Prior to Medicare's enactment, it was nearly impossible for older people to obtain health insurance, as they were considered a "bad risk."
Medicare provides universal coverage to Americans over 65 years of age. The law created Medicare Part A as a national hospital insurance program. Part B is a voluntary program for doctor visits and other medical services. Medicare Part C is another name for the privatized, for-profit version of the program called "Medicare Advantage." And Part D is the prescription drug program enacted in 2003.
The Hospital Insurance portion is funded through workers' payroll contributions. At the signing ceremony in Independence, Missouri, LBJ said, "Through this new law, every citizen will be able, in their productive years when they are earning, to insure themselves against the ravages of illness in his old age."
Lyndon Johnson paid tribute to former President Harry S. Truman, presenting him with the very first Medicare card. It was Truman who, 20 years earlier, had proposed a form of universal medical coverage for the American people.
LBJ quoted Truman's remarks from the 1940s:
Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.
It turned out that the time had not yet arrived. Truman's proposal failed to gain traction during a time of retrenchment from the expansions of the New Deal, and a Republican majority on Capitol Hill which he famously labeled the "Do-Nothing Congress."
President Johnson's determination to enact his Great Society agenda (of which Medicare was a large part) and sheer political muscle—not to mention solid Democratic control of Congress—pushed Medicare (and its sister program, Medicaid) into being.
Naturally, Medicare faced strong opposition from conservatives. None other than Ronald Reagan made the ludicrous prediction that if Medicare were enacted, "You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Sixty years later, we are no less "free" because of Medicare. In fact, having guaranteed healthcare makes seniors and people with disabilities (and their families) much more free—from disease, from worry, and financial ruin.
Today, 68 million people rely on Medicare for health coverage, including 12 million who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare isn't perfect: The for-profit Medicare Advantage (Part C) program is extremely problematic (see below). The Medicare Part A trust fund will become depleted in 2033 if Congress fails to take action to strengthen it. Traditional Medicare still doesn't cover basic hearing, vision, and dental care—which we have been pushing for many years. But most concerning of all—President Donald Trump and his party have spent this 60th anniversary year actively undermining both Medicare and Medicaid.
The "Unfair, Ugly" bill that Trump signed earlier this month slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which will strip health coverage from an estimated 10 to 16 million lower-income Americans. The new law—projected to add some $4 trillion to the national debt—could trigger cuts to Medicare down the road.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly taking steps to privatize the entire Medicare program. It has announced a pilot project to involve private companies in conducting prior authorizations for care in traditional Medicare. The administration, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, also has announced a plan to automatically enroll new Medicare beneficiaries in the for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) program—a huge gift to the multibillion dollar insurance industry at the expense of patients.
The problems with Medicare Advantage (MA) have become legendary. Enrollees are basically put into health maintenance organizations run by insurance giants, with limited networks of providers. Unreasonable denials of care are rampant. Patients who become disenchanted with MA plans often find it nearly impossible to switch to traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, some MA Insurers have been overcharging the government for their services and ripping off taxpayers. (Several of these companies are currently under investigation.)
We are watching to see if the Trump administration, which talks a good game about lowering prescription medication costs while simultaneously doing favors for Big Pharma, will honor the provisions of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which made myriad patient-friendly reforms to the Part D drug program—including out of pocket caps for beneficiaries and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices with the industry.
The bottom line is: Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society. We and our fellow advocacy groups are pushing back—and so is the grassroots "Hands Off" movement. But we don't want to be fighting this same battle every time Medicare (and Medicaid) mark an anniversary when we should be purely celebrating.
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As Medicaid Turns 60, Immigrant and BIPOC Communities Face an Uncertain Future
The Medicaid cuts passed in the recent budget bill will severely limit access to coverage for millions, particularly those already living at the margins.
Jul 30, 2025
July 30 marks the 60th anniversary of Medicaid, a program that, since 1965, has provided critical healthcare coverage to millions of people in the U.S. It was created as a promise: that no one should be denied medical care because of their income, background, or zip code. But as we mark this milestone, that promise is in jeopardy, especially for immigrant, BIPOC, and rural communities who rely on Medicaid the most.
Legislation that included deep cuts to Medicaid was signed into law by the president as part of a broader budget package. While many of these cuts won’t take effect until 2027, their impact will be devastating. These changes will severely limit access to coverage for millions, particularly those already living at the margins.
Medicaid is more than a public program. For many, it is the only way to see a doctor, receive prenatal care, or access family planning. It’s the largest payer of reproductive healthcare in the United States, covering 42% of all births and more than 75% of publicly funded family planning services. For people in rural areas or healthcare deserts, Medicaid is the last lifeline.
And yet, it’s being chipped away.
Medicaid is turning 60. Instead of weakening it, we should be strengthening its reach and renewing its purpose for the next generation.
In rural America, where nearly 50% of pregnant people rely on Medicaid and OB-GYNs are increasingly hard to find, any change in funding can be catastrophic. Patients already drive hundreds of miles for basic services—cancer screenings, contraception, abortion care. Add new hurdles to coverage, and these journeys become impossible for many.
These cuts won’t just affect undocumented immigrants. Immigrant families, including many with U.S. citizen children, will be among the hardest hit. Years of anti-immigrant policies have already led to fear and confusion about accessing public benefits. Now, eligibility restrictions and additional red tape will create further barriers for families in need of prenatal, postpartum, or emergency care.
At the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP), we are already seeing the strain. We work with pregnant people from across the country—many in rural or under-resourced areas who can’t afford abortion care or find it nearby.
This isn’t just policy. It’s people trying to stay healthy, raise their kids, and survive.
Black and Latina women are already more likely to rely on publicly funded clinics for reproductive care. These communities are also more likely to experience hospital closures and provider shortages. Cuts to Medicaid only deepen existing racial and economic disparities in care access.
As a nonprofit, WRRAP is nonpartisan, but we are not neutral when it comes to justice and survival. Medicaid is turning 60. Instead of weakening it, we should be strengthening its reach and renewing its purpose for the next generation.
Here’s what you can do right now:
·Learn more: Many of these changes are complex and delayed, making it easy to overlook their real impact. Follow trusted sources like WRRAP and Guttmacher Institute.
·Donate: Support abortion funds like WRRAP that help cover the gap when people are denied abortion care. Every dollar helps a real person.
·Know your elected officials: Meet with them now and learn what their commitments are to their communities.
·Register and help others register to vote in 2026: While we are nonpartisan, we strongly believe that civic participation matters.
·Talk about this: Bring it up at work, school, places of worship, and in your group chats. When we break the silence, we build momentum. History has never changed through silence, it changes when we speak up, stand up, and refuse to back down.
·Advocate locally: Your state can expand or protect Medicaid access regardless of federal changes.
When our rights are under attack, compliance is complicity. The decisions being made today will shape access for years to come. Immigrant and BIPOC communities cannot afford to lose Medicaid. They shouldn’t have to fight for the right to care.
As we celebrate 60 years of Medicaid, be loud, be unapologetic, be unrelenting. Because healthcare is not a privilege. It is a right. And it is worth fighting for.
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Trump Is Making the Gilded Age Great Again
Trump’s duties on foreign imports will undercut the fiscal foundations of a middle-class American society that we’ve known for more than a century, creating a new age of rising private fortunes and deepening inequality.
Jul 29, 2025
Count on one thing: If Mark Twain, the famed American author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about U.S. President Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a 19th-century version of our Trumpian moment, tariffs and all.
“They want me to go in with them on the sly,” says Colonel Sellers, the antihero of that novel. Lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the colonel explains to his wide-eyed dinner guest how they would “buy a 113 wild cat banks in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri… and then all of sudden… Whiz! the stock of every one of those wildcats would spin… profit on the speculation not a dollar less than 40 millions!”
With Twain’s uncanny insight into the American character, his novel presaged the quarter-century to follow so accurately that, in the end, it lent its name to “the Gilded Age,” that era of rapid industrialization and rising robber-baron fortunes. Ripped from two centuries of Puritan moral moorings by an “inflamed desire for sudden wealth,” the novel’s archetypal American families are caught in a “fever of speculation” that sends them scrambling across the continent in a frenzied search for jackpot profits.
With money then breeding its own morality, the era’s capitalist excess naturally begat Trumpian-style corruption. When unpaid wages stopped the construction of his railroad out West, Twain’s character Colonel Sellers sent the project’s chief engineer to the head office in New York City to find out what had happened to the missing money.
If we combine the social impact of his recent “Big Beautiful” budget bill, which extends the 2017 tax cuts, with his skyrocketing tariffs, Trump seems to be trying to undo the landmark tax legislation of 1913 by reducing or replacing the progressive income tax with tariff revenues that are really a regressive tax on the poor.
“The matter is simple enough,” the company’s president explained matter-of-factly to the astonished engineer. “A Congressional appropriation costs money. A majority of the House Committee, say $10,000 apiece—$40,000; a majority of the Senate Committee, the same each—say $40,000; a little extra to one or two chairmen of two such committees, say $10,000 each—$20,000; and there’s $100,000 of the money gone.”
Beneath the spectacle of soaring stock prices, spreading railroad networks, smoking steel mills, powerful trust monopolies, and conspicuous consumption by the country’s ever-increasing number of millionaires, Twain discerned a deep underlying insecurity to be the very essence of what became known as the Gilded Age. “It is a time,” he wrote, “when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.”
Looking at contemporary America through Twain’s somber vision can teach us something significant about our own time that has so far eluded the mainstream media—particularly the profound political implications of President Trump’s wild global tariff regime. Those duties on foreign imports will not just raise prices and stoke inflation, as the media has indeed been telling us, but all too crucially undercut the fiscal foundations of a middle-class American society that we’ve known for more than a century, creating a new Gilded Age of rising private fortunes—in our time, billionaires—and deepening social inequality.
And with Donald Trump in mind, let’s take a little trip through a history that’s anything but Tom Sawyeresque.
Cycles of Change
Give Twain full credit: When writing that novel, he also intuited that the economic juggernaut driving his Gilded Age would come crashing down in what proved to be the devastating panic of 1893. The country had indeed suffered 11 previous panics, most of them regional or relatively short-lived. This one would be different. As New York banks held fire sales of assets to meet a cash crunch, some 340 banks nationwide simply suspended operations, while industrial output shrank by 15%, and unemployment hit an unprecedented 19%. Adding to the difficulties of workers, the McKinley Tariff of 1890, named after then-representative (and not yet president) William McKinley, had imposed record-high duties of 50% on imports and so raised the price of many basic consumer goods, which should sound all too familiar in the age of Trump. The panic then became a full-blown, four-year depression that sent thousands of the unemployed, then called Coxey’s Army, marching on Washington to demand redress from Congress.
Not only was that panic an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, but it was also the first in a boom-and-bust cycle that has marked America’s unbridled capitalism up to the present moment—with each boom producing spectacular private wealth and each bust fostering abject public misery and mass reform movements. Like Icarus of Greek legend, whose wings of wax carried him too close to the sun, the U.S. economy sometimes flies so high that its wax wings melt. The ensuing crash is so searing, immiserating so many for so long, that it can inspire sustained movements for change.
The severity of the protracted 1893 depression that ended the Gilded Age sparked myriad calls for social change and lead to the Progressive Era during which labor unions organized workers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People started its struggle for civil rights, and women marched for suffrage. Investigative reporters called “muckrakers” also began publishing exposés of financial power and political corruption in mass-circulation magazines like McClure’s and Collier’s Weekly, thereby setting an agenda for political reform. In major cities, middle-class reformers opened settlement houses for poor immigrants, enacted housing codes to ban cold-water tenements, and set up free public schools. At the state level, progressives like Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette battled the railroad monopolies that gouged farmers desperate to get their crops to market.
Meanwhile, at the national level in 1913, Democratic reformers in Congress slashed the country’s high tariffs (long a regressive tax on working-class consumers), replacing them with a progressive income tax whose top rate was then 7% on incomes over $500,000. Since the federal government had long used tariffs as its prime source of revenue, Progressive era legislators fully grasped just how fundamentally regressive they were, and fought successfully to cut the tariff rate from President McKinley’s 29% in 1899 to just 6% by 1917. Typically, the import duties that refiners in Brooklyn and Philadelphia paid on raw Cuban sugar would be passed on to consumers as higher prices. And clearly, the cost of a cup of sugar then took a far more significant slice out of a worker’s wages than it did from the kitchen budget of a millionaire’s chef. Requiring those who had the least to pay the most was a glaring economic injustice that would inspire progressive reformers to fight tariffs with an impassioned intensity that seems almost incomprehensible today.
The Roaring ’20s
But all that momentum for change stalled when, in 1917, the United States entered World War I and then segued to a postwar decade of speculative frenzy. At war’s end in 1918, Forbes magazine published its first ranking of the country’s richest men, with oil baron John D. Rockefeller then America’s first and only billionaire, followed by 29 millionaires (whose fortunes, corrected for inflation, would make them billionaires today)—industrial tycoons like Andrew Carnegie (steel), J. Ogden Armour (meat packing), Henry Ford (autos), Daniel Guggenheim (mining), and Pierre Du Pont II (chemicals).
After the stock market started roaring in the 1920s, however, it minted hundreds of new millionaires, while sales of cars, telephones, radios, and appliances boomed. Between 1921 and 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average for shares on the New York Stock Exchange surged by 600%.
As a parallel tide of political repression swept the country, American Legion veterans broke up socialist rallies, a young J. Edgar Hoover rounded up radicals for deportation, and bloody race riots swept Chicago and Washington, D.C. While Republican conservatives took control of Congress and the White House, a revived Ku Klux Klan ran the legislatures of a half-dozen states, lobbied Congress to enact immigration restrictions, and presided over some 400 lynchings of African-Americans.
The Depression Decade of the 1930s
The stock market that came in like a roaring lion at the start of the 1920s went out like a bleating lamb at decade’s end. On Black Monday, October 28, 1929, it suddenly dropped 13%, lost another 12% on Black Tuesday, and kept sliding into the summer of 1932, losing 90% of its value in a fall so steep it wouldn’t reach that peak again until 1954.
By the time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, was inaugurated in 1933, the nation was in dire straits. About 25% of the workforce, or some 13 million people, were unemployed—with thousands of “hobos” riding the rails, long lines snaking outside soup kitchens, and shanty towns (dubbed “Hoovervilles” after the indifferent president who had preceded FDR) huddled outside cities large and small. In the industrial northeast, factories shut down. In the Great Plains, thousands abandoned their farms in the country’s “dust bowl” and headed for California.
By the time the New Deal was done in 1945, the Roosevelt administration had brought high-flying U.S. capitalism down to Earth, with regulations that curbed speculative excess, while preventing spectacular crashes.
So deep and desperate was the Great Depression that President Roosevelt had ample public support to enact a “New Deal” of unprecedented socioeconomic reforms, creating nothing less than the modern federal government. To provide work for the unemployed, FDR formed the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration that mobilized nearly 9 million people to build 8,000 parks, 75,000 bridges, and 650,000 miles of roads. Private sector workers won the right to form unions and strike under the National Labor Relations Board, largely ending the union-busting and goon violence of decades past. Since the country had no form of retirement savings, FDR formed the Social Security Administration in 1935 (which currently sends benefits to 66 million Americans).
To fully electrify the economy, the New Deal dotted the U.S. with massive hydroelectric projects like the Fort Peck Dam and delivered cheap power to farms through the Rural Electrification Administration. To make air travel affordable, the Roosevelt administration built 800 airports nationwide, notably LaGuardia Airport in New York City.
To end the bank runs that periodically wiped out customers’ deposits, his Banking Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to enforce restrictions on banking speculation, and a year later formed the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect ordinary investors from fraud.
As the New Deal raised the tax rate for the top income bracket from 79% to a historic high of 94% by 1945, the share of all U.S. income earned by the richest 1% fell from a peak of 24% in 1928 to just 10% after World War II and would remain there until 1980. That change would be foundational for the middle-class democracy that many still regard as archetypally American.
In sum, by the time the New Deal was done in 1945, the Roosevelt administration had brought high-flying U.S. capitalism down to Earth, with regulations that curbed speculative excess, while preventing spectacular crashes.
A New Gilded Age
As the Cold War drew to a close during the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan advanced a conservative agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, sparking the start of a new Gilded Age that, over the next 30-plus years, would produce a level of economic inequality not seen for nearly a century. That era also coincided with a succession of financial crises that could have sparked serious economic depressions had they not been constrained by the regulatory mechanisms the New Deal had put in place.
By slashing the tax rate on the highest incomes from 70% to just 28%, President Reagan catalyzed a steady climb in private wealth that would continue unchecked for decades to come. By 2007, the richest 1% were already earning 24% of the nation’s income, putting them right back where they had been in the 1920s.
Just as railroads were the iconic industry of the original Gilded Age, so the Internet and its corporate spin-offs became the prime driver of our current era of excess. The release of software developer programs like Mosaic combined with a sharp increase in U.S. households with a personal computer—from just 15% in 1990 to 35% by 1997—became the prime ingredients for the “dot-com bubble” of the late 1990s. Growing numbers of Americans started shopping at Amazon.com, searching on Google, and booking travel online at Expedia.
As the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened up the broadcast spectrum and the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 cut capital gains taxes on stock transactions, the Nasdaq stock exchange, which features tech listings, rose by 400% in a five-year frenzy of speculative trading for almost any stock with “.com” in its name. Adding fuel to that blazing fire, in 1999 the White House of President Bill Clinton encouraged Congress to repeal the New Deal’s Banking Act of 1933, allowing financial speculation through the merger of retail and investment banking.
In March 2000, the dot-com bubble finally burst, and the Nasdaq stock index started a sustained fall that virtually wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Over the next two years, markets were also shaken by serious scandals after company officers falsified returns to feed the market frenzy, bankrupting a half-dozen major corporations, including WorldCom, the country’s second-largest telephone company; Enron, a top energy corporation with revenues of $100 billion; and Adelphia, a prominent cable television provider with over two million subscribers. To correct what one leading law firm called “a broader culture of greed and deception that had taken root in the corporate world,” Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 that tightened financial regulations to protect investors from systemic fraud.
Nonetheless, an even greater panic soon followed. Freed from the New Deal Banking Act’s restraint on speculation, investment banks began engaging in predatory lending of subprime mortgages and aggressive marketing of mortgage-backed securities, producing a profit-taking craze that came crashing down in the Great Recession of 2007-2009. As the country’s fourth-largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsed and its fifth-largest, Bear Sterns, was liquidated in a “fire sale,” the financial system trembled at the brink of collapse. Recognizing the seriousness of the crisis, Congress quickly authorized corporate bailouts funded by a $700 billion appropriation under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. By the time the Great Recession ended in mid-2009, unemployment had doubled to 10% and the Dow Jones Average had fallen by 50%. But the country had indeed been spared another Great Depression.
The Advent of Donald Trump
During those 30 years of boom and bust, however, one trend remained remarkably steady: The rich just kept getting richer. The number of global billionaires listed by Forbes magazine would increase tenfold from 291 in 1992 to 2,781 in 2024, with a total wealth of $14.2 trillion. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Forbes included Donald Trump among them, estimating his wealth at $4.5 billion.
In past periods of conservative Republican rule, Congress and the White House served the interests of the richest 1%, whether industrialists or Internet tycoons. But in 2016, for the very first time, the American people put a genuine billionaire in the White House and, to nobody’s surprise, he soon made it clear that his only consistent concern was serving the interests of his peers.
In the first year of his first term, in fact, Trump enacted the 2017 tax cuts that The New York Times called “the most sweeping tax overhaul in decades.” By cutting the corporate tax rate from 39% to 21%, reducing the top individual income tax rate from 39.6% to 37%, and doubling the size of estates exempt from being taxed to $11.2 million, those Trump tax cuts, economists found, produced a marked increase in “after-tax income for high-income households.” Indeed, the bottom 20% of wage earners saved just $60 each, while the upper 1% gained $51,000 each and the top 0.1% at least $193,000.
Without such mass protests and a determined democratic opposition at the ballot box, the Trump administration will persist with a tax and tariff policy aimed at creating the sorts of social inequity and economic privilege not seen since Mark Twain’s original Gilded Age.
Yet even that landmark legislation would pale before the inequitable impact of Trump’s tax policies in his second term in office, which all too literally sought to overturn the fiscal foundations of the Progressive Era reforms that had shaped American middle-class society for more than a century. If we combine the social impact of his recent “Big Beautiful” budget bill, which extends the 2017 tax cuts, with his skyrocketing tariffs, Trump seems to be trying to undo the landmark tax legislation of 1913 by reducing or replacing the progressive income tax with tariff revenues that are really a regressive tax on the poor. When the budget’s tax cuts for the rich are combined with his escalating tariffs that are bound to raise prices for ordinary consumers, those twinned policies are guaranteed to produce a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, creating an ever steeper version of social inequality that is fast fostering a new Gilded Age (and the economic disasters that are bound to go with it).
Apart from his trade war with China, in his first term Trump actually had little impact on tariffs. By the time he left office in 2021, he had raised the average import duty only incrementally from 1.4% to 2.8%—a far cry from the record 50% rate of the 1890 McKinley Tariff, and so still an insignificant factor in both Federal revenues and the average American’s cost of living.
In his inaugural address last January, however, Trump praised his distant predecessor, saying, “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent—he was a natural businessman—and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal.” In a Rose Garden ceremony on his April 2 “Liberation Day,” President Trump ordered record-high tariffs for all the world’s nations, with duties of 50% on imports from Lesotho and 84% on those from China. Then, in an interview with Fox News on April 15, the president suggested, “There is a chance that the money from tariffs could be so great that it would replace” the income tax. As the average import duty started climbing to 15%, his trade adviser Peter Navarro projected that Trump’s tariffs could raise $600 billion in revenues, or more than a third of the $1.6 trillion in individual income taxes the Internal Revenue Service collected in 2024.
During the four-month blitz of tariff orders that followed, the Trump White House has insisted on the fiction that other countries will simply pay those import duties. After proclaiming himself a “Tariff man,” during the 2024 election campaign Trump told his rallies that “a tariff is a tax on a foreign country… A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No, no, no, it’s a tax on a foreign country.”
In May, when Walmart’s CEO exposed the transparent falsity of that statement by stating, “Higher tariffs will result in higher prices,” an apoplectic president told the company to “EAT THE TARIFFS.” In mid-July, when Trump announced another round of tariffs that were to reach a McKinleyesque level of 50%, a White House spokesman repeated that exculpatory falsehood, saying: “The Administration has consistently maintained that the cost of tariffs will be borne by foreign exporters who rely on access to the American economy.”
Rising Resistance
With surprising speed, Americans are starting to see through such sophistry and resistance to the Trump administration is rising. Despite his repeated denials, a Gallup poll taken in April found that 89% of all Americans believe that “higher tariffs will result in… paying more for products.” And in late June, as Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill neared legislative approval with massive cuts to health care for millions of Americans, a Quinnipiac University poll found 55% of the country opposed the bill and only 29% supported it.
Those polls reflected a growing opposition to Trump’s policies. In April, his then-ally Elon Musk poured a record-breaking $25 million into the election for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, but the opposing Democratic candidate still won a stunning double-digit victory. In June, five million Americans in 2,200 cities and towns across the country marched in anti-Trump “No Kings” rallies, which added up to the largest single day of mass demonstrations in U.S. history.
After only six months of Trump’s term, it is still not clear whether his erratic economic policies—disrupting supply chains, creating labor shortages from mass deportations, and inducing record inflation—will inflict sufficient social pain to inspire a sustained movement for change. But one thing is already quite clear: Without such mass protests and a determined democratic opposition at the ballot box, the Trump administration will persist with a tax and tariff policy aimed at creating the sorts of social inequity and economic privilege not seen since Mark Twain’s original Gilded Age. Consequently, the grim economic results down the line are painfully predictable.
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The Answer to Medicaid Cuts Should Be Medicare For All
Medicare For All is broadly popular, supported by the majority of the population, and affects everyone in the country. So what are we waiting for?
Jul 27, 2025
Following the recent passage of U.S. President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda, there’s been a lot of discussion about how the bill will affect average Americans. One provision which has received a lot of attention in particular has been the proposed cuts to Medicaid.
Medicaid represents a crucial stopgap for working Americans, one of the few things keeping our healthcare system afloat as costs have skyrocketed. Cuts to the program could have devastating effects. For instance, many of the country’s rural hospitals (as well as nursing homes and community health clinics) rely heavily on Medicaid payments and could be forced to shut their doors without them. It’s estimated this could lead to thousands of deaths.
The Democratic Party has yet to come up with a viable alternative to this. Fortunately, there’s a solution. And it happens to be supported by the majority of Americans—embrace Medicare For All.
America is the only country in the developed world without a universal healthcare system. Our current model for care is bloated, wasteful, inhumane, and driven by corporate greed. According to a 2024 report by the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. ranked last when compared with 10 other wealthy, industrialized nations on metrics such as life expectancy, preventable deaths, and access to care, despite spending by far the most on healthcare.
It’s essential that we transition to a system that prioritizes patient care over profit.
There are several reasons why America’s system is so expensive (high administrative costs, the government’s inability to negotiate drug prices), but one crucial reason is that we’ve opted for a patchwork system. America has four models for healthcare—one system for the workforce, one system for people over 65, one system for veterans, and no system at all for the roughly 8% of the country that remains uninsured.
Pretty much every other country has settled on one model for everyone, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. That’s the sensible way of doing things. In 2020, a comparative analysis of 22 separate studies found that Medicare For All would save billions, if not trillions of dollars, for Americans.
Medicare For All is broadly popular, supported by the majority of the population, and affects everyone in the country. We know that it works and would do an enormous amount to relieve people’s financial burdens. The top cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt. This program would also save tens of thousands of lives every year. If it were to pass, it might secure a voting base for the Democratic Party for at least a generation, the way Social Security and the original Medicare bill did.
It’s essential that we transition to a system that prioritizes patient care over profit. We must follow the example of every other developed country and guarantee healthcare coverage to all our citizens as a basic human right.
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